14 DAY TRIAL // The self-claimed world's largest and most advanced video search engine, blinkx, has recorded a serious increase of traffic over the last period. The increasing number of visitors is mainly due to the rumors about a possible Google or News Corp bid for the video search engine website. It appears that the company currently owning the blinkx site has seen its shares up to 36.75 pence, the highest recorded level since September.
blinkx was founded back in 2004 by Suranga Chandratillake, which is also the company's CTO. Since then, blinkx has enjoyed considerably significant success, which led Suranga Chandratillake to list the company on the London Stock Exchange in May 2007. The success of the blinkx video search engine is due to a technology that the company received from the Cambridge University. It allows the search engine to use speech recognition and video analysis software in order to render better search results. At the moment, blinkx prides itself with over 18 million hours of searchable video content and more than 200 media partnerships.
The impressive numbers recorded by blinkx are what might have drawn Google and News Corp's attention. In the context of its continuous lookout for ways to improve its search engine, rumors of Google bidding for blinkx are somewhat justifiable. News Corp could also be interested, mainly because of its Hulu project. Hulu was released back in 2007 as a partnership between News Corp and NBC and it has been said to be a Google video search engine killer.
Yahoo is also rumored to be interested in the acquisition of blinkx and the company's more recent announcements about its search engine are something to be taken into account when analyzing this possibility. Officials from either Google or News Corp haven't made any statements regarding the bidding rumors, at this point.
However, if the rumors are correct, whichever of the two companies acquires blinkx is going to benefit from a powerful video search engine.